Computer Application for English Language Teaching

Week 5  

Using corpus analysis software to analyse specialized texts

What is corpus?

    A corpus can be generally defined as a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software.

Sources of language corpora

      You can subscribe to a large corpus provider such as the British National Corpus (BNC)

       http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

      Use web concordancing         
     http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk

      Compile own corpora and analyze data using corpus analysis software

       Antconc’(http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html)

      Sources of specialized texts

-Printed materials

-Word document texts

-CD-Rom

-Texts on the web

-Online databases

Analyzing Specialized Corpus

1.Terminologies and collocation

2. Local grammar

3. Style

          - personification

          - use of passive structure 

4. Content knowledge

          - use of acronyms

          - use of 'known as'  and  'to be defined as'  to clarify terms.